Regional directorates in areas such as Health, Education, Culture or Tourism to disappear and it will be integrated into the Coordination and Regional Development Commissions (CCDR). According to Jornal de Notícias, the second phase of the decentralization process will be carried out in stages, until reaching the extinction of dozens of positions in these areas and should be completed by 2024.
The announcement that the objective was the integration of these bodies into the CCDR was made by António Costa, at the end of 2021, but without details. Now, during the discussion of the State Budgets for 2022, the Minister of Cohesion, Ana Abrunhosa, left no room for many doubts: “With the concentration of powers in the CCDR, what is going to happen is that these regional directorates vanishmanagement positions disappear and the people who are needed join the CCDR”.
It is, therefore, a transfer of powers that will more power to territorial commissions and that will make entities such as the Regional Directorates of Education, the Regional Directorates of Health, the Regional Delegations of the IEFP, the Regional Tourism Entities or the Regional Directorates of Nature Conservation disappear. Along the same lines, the officials of these bodies will also be integrated in the North, Center, Lisbon and Vale do Tejo, Alentejo and Algarve CCDRs, which will mean the extinction of several positions.
Ana Abrunhosa admitted, during a parliamentary hearing, that it will be a process “painful“, justifying that “the structures will disappear” and “many national agencies will also lose competencies and power”. “This is what decentralization and regionalization mean,” she stressed.
The explanatory note of the parliamentary hearing, cited by JN, anticipates that it is a process “very ambitiousand that the Government intends to carry it out “by the end of 2023”, which will be done gradually and that “by 2024 all the powers of the aforementioned services and agencies are considered transferred”.
Source: Observadora
